On Twitter, freelance editor Tricia Dearborn writes of the problems that arise she sees in manuscripts that have been structured, organized, or refined using gen AI:

Turned out these manuscripts had structural problems. But that wasn’t the issue. Manu manuscripts have structural problems.

The issue was that there was no way to fix the structural problems.

When a human author has written a work, when there’s a unifying intelligence behind it, it’s easy for an experienced editor to work out what the problem is, get a sense of what the author is trying to do, and (often) see how it could be fixed.

When a work has been generated by AI, there is no unifying intelligence.

Elsewhere on Twitter, I’ve seen critiques of generative AI and reports of problems related to its use, going beyond the typical “it just generates slop”:

• LLM-based agents are failing for general-purpose problem solving because they don’t select actions to maximize the user’s expected utility but rather are optimized to generate the next token in a string of text
• Source code control platform GitHub is “hitting a breaking point as AI coding agents flood the platform with far more commits, pull requests, searches, and CI jobs than its older infrastructure was built to handle.”
• OpenAI’s coding agent Codex based on GPT-5.5 has an instruction telling it “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creates unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.”

We may be entering the trough of disillusionment in the generative AI hype cycle.

But maybe not, if you look at stock returns for AI-related equities vs the rest of the U.S. large cap market:

I’ve stopped subscribing to any premium version of Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. I’ve found their performance lacking. I rarely use them to help me write, though I do use them to learn about topics I don’t know much about.

Today I want to write about a life defined by saying no: the vita negativa. But I am going to start with something different: the via negativa, a way of describing and knowing, that has usually been applied to the question of what God is and is not. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb expanded the via negativa’s domain to apply to any situation in life.

Via negativa as theology and as a principle for understanding the world

In Skin in the Game, Taleb defines the via negativa as:

the principle that we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is right, and that knowledge grows by subtraction. Also, it is easier to know that something is wrong than to find the fix. Actions that remove are more robust than those that add because addition may have unseen, complicated feedback loops.

The term has usually been used in the context of theology, suggesting a way to understand God, by saying what God is not rather than by saying what God is. That’s known as apophatic theology, coming from the Greek word for denial. Apophatic theologians think that because God is infinite and transcends human experience it cannot be described by humans.

But Taleb applies this to non-theological situations. In his article Via Negativa: The Process of Making Good Decisions by Eliminating Bad Ones, Abhishek Chakraborty elucidates Taleb’s principle:

Most business plans are made, how-to books are written, and policies are designed by charlatans pretending to be experts. The learning of life is more about what to avoid. For e.g., avoiding cigarettes, junk food, toxic relationships, slow friends, overconfident confidants.

Warren Buffett advices the same when he says that the first rule of investment is, Never lose money. The second rule is, Never forget Rule 1. Since we know what is fragile, eliminating fragilities by reducing downsides is in itself a good winning strategy. For example, removing a bad hire or a bad leader is thus far more effective than adding good hires or appointing good leaders. Similarly, not doing what we know is wrong is far more effective than doing what we think is right….

Not going bust, not losing friends, not making stupid decisions, and not having any downsides are effective steps towards achieving antifragility—a state of a system when it gains more from disorders, stressors, and shocks.

My new trading regime has at its heart a desire to reduce and avoid large drawdowns, so it uses the via negativa. However, it doesn’t guarantee I won’t lose money. It simply reduces the chances of that.

How not to live, from Byung-Chul Han

The via negativa makes me think of Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of what’s wrong with society in his book The Burnout Society. Written in German with the title Müdigkeitsgesellschaft which translates to “Tiredness Society” or “Society of Fatigue,” it describes the shift from a disciplinary society where institutions control what people do to an achievement society, where people drive themselves towards the aims of society such as accruing money, building social prestige, and acquiring consumer goods.

Han writes:

The achievement-subject stands free from any external instance of domination [Herrschaftsinstanz] forcing it to work, much less exploiting it. It is lord and master of itself. Thus, it is subject to no one—or, as the case may be, only to itself. It differs from the obedience-subject on this score. However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement.

Han’s book largely describes what not to do with one’s life, that is, do not engage in auto-exploitation, driving yourself towards greater and greater achievement. But he spends a bit of time talking about what to do instead. His answer is the vita contemplativa, i.e., the contemplative life, a life Nietzsche described and lived.

But this way of life is still expressed in the negative, as a not-doing instead of a doing:

The vita contemplativa is not a matter of passive affirmation and being open to whatever happens. Instead, it offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli. Instead of surrendering the gaze to external impulses, it steers them in sovereign fashion. As a mode of saying no, sovereign action [Tun] proves more active than any and all hyperactivity, which represents a symptom of mental exhaustion.

So here, the vita contemplativa is a vita negativa, a life of saying no.

Living the vita negativa

What does it look like to take sovereign action of the kind Han describes, saying no? It looks like: Refusing to go back to a corporate technology job which was soul-killing even as it was bank-account-filling. Resisting the call of society to partner up when singlehood proves more authentic. Dropping the idea of turning a hobby into a bustling, hustling business.

This creates space in life that some self help authors might say will make room for what you really want to show up. But maybe the emptiness is it. Maybe what’s not there is more important than what is there.

About a month ago I wrote about an alternative to buy-and-hold investing: swing trading. I started putting that into practice a little and had some success but have chosen a different way forward at this point: the options wheel.

With the options wheel, you sell cash-secured (or naked) puts which pay you a premium and may require you to buy a stock (or ETF) at the strike price, should the price of that stock hit the strike price (or below). If you get assigned the stock (meaning the price is at or below the strike price at option expiration) you will now be holding that position, possibly with a gain or loss depending on the premium you received and the current stock price. Once you hold the stock, you can sell covered calls, which means you have the responsibility to sell the stock to the call holder should the price of the stock reach the strike price of the new option by the expiration date.

In the options wheel, you are generating premiums by selling puts and calls. Many options wheel traders seek to avoid assignment and treat the covered call part of the wheel as a recovery strategy, not as the core income strategy.

In a strong uptrend, the wheel underperforms buying and holding stocks. But in choppier markets and downtrends, the wheel can outperform. It is obviously a much more active strategy than buy-and-hold passive index funds. In that way, it suits me, because I do love to be active with my money management.

There’s not a lot of evidence about how the wheel performs in comparison to buy-and-hold, but some say you can expect 12 to 18% annual returns targeting a delta (representing the probability that you get assigned) of 0.20 to 0.30, which is very conservative. Because you can also double dip by putting the cash you’re holding in case of assignment into a money market fund or other dividend-yielding investment, you can actually boost this by whatever the prevailing interest rate is (about 3.5% right now for Schwab’s main money market fund). By increasing the delta at which you can sell puts, you can increase the potential returns at the cost of possibly suffering large drawdowns in the case of corrections, crashes, or bear markets. A moderate wheel strategy selling puts and calls at 0.30 to 0.40 delta might produce a target annual return of 15 to 22%, on top of the yield you get on your cash (not when you’re assigned though!)

I’m combining wheeling with technical analysis (analyzing price, momentum, and volume charts for each ticker), light fundamental analysis (evaluating actual businesses with respect to their earnings, cash flow, revenue, and more), and macroeconomic analysis. The last is more for fun than for profit as I’ve found that it doesn’t help that much in choosing tickers that will go on to do well, although it did inform the large position in gold I established last year.

It’s useful to also gauge where we are in the stock market cycle, because that can help me decide whether to take on more or less risk when wheeling, or when doing any kind of trading. There are various models for this, but let’s use Michael Howell’s recently shared on an episode of the Forward Guidance podcast (extracted from the podcast transcript by Gemini):

We are in the “Speculation” phase now, as anyone watching the semiconductor stocks moon would have already guessed. We have seen the real economy accelerate, with massive investment into data centers and all that entails (purchase of chips, constructing buildings, hiring plumbers and other tradesmen, arranging for adequate electricity supply). Cash is being drained from other sectors such as software, which seems right now like an also-ran in the dash for AI returns.

Howell suggests that it’s not time to exit the market entirely but instead a period to “pay back risk” that you’ve taken on before and prepare for a winter of Turbulence. That could be a tough period for an options wheel trader except that chop increases implied volatility which leads to higher options premiums. That reflects greater risk though so it’s not altogether a good thing. It does offer some opportunities though.

My plan is to maintain a conservative stance but not too conservative. I know that this Speculation phase could last months or years longer. That happened during the dotcom boom. In late 1996, Fed Chair Alan Greenspan used the phrase irrational exuberance to question whether rising asset values were driven by unwarranted investor enthusiasm rather than economic fundamentals. The stock market didn’t reach its ultimate peak until March of 2000. If we consider the introduction of ChatGPT to have launched this latest iteration of speculation in November of 2022, it could be that we’re reaching peak bubble now. But who knows if this one could run even longer? One more year? Two?

This week I’ve been wondering about whether my daily activities — trading options and walking dogs mostly — could be considered authentic. And could they be considered meaningful? Do they have value to the world beyond my enjoyment of them?

Charles Taylor on a new ethics of authenticity

In his book The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the ideal of authenticity has been corrupted in modern life to mean merely developing one’s individualism and optimizing the self for personal gain. He argues that true authenticity requires self-reflection (understanding what really matters to you), dialogue (allowing your interactions with others to shape your identity and acknowledging their role in that), and responsiveness (orienting yourself to meaning that transcends your personal whims and preferences).

Taylor believed that there exist objective horizons of significance which allow us to escape our individual concerns and connect to what matters to humanity beyond our singular selves. Taylor’s version of authenticity grounds itself in morality and rejects moral subjectivism. His work aligns with that of British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, which also rejected the idea that morality and authenticity are unique to individuals. Murdoch proposed that morality requires unselfing, putting down egoistic concerns and fantasies that obscure one’s experience of reality, especially the reality of others.

In his 1999 book Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Taylor cites Murdoch and credits her with bringing back the idea that the Good is something we can recognize outside of ourselves. We don’t merely project our idea of it onto a neutral world. While Murdoch proposed that you should look at the world and its denizens with attention and love, dropping fantasies that obscure them and apply your selfish concerns onto them, Taylor expanded his efforts into a historical and social project. He suggested that our ability to perceive the Good depends on the health of the society we live in. His communitarian vision suggested we should work to improve that.

What activities count as authentic? As moral?

I returned to the question of authenticity and right (moral) action recently as I contemplated my recent emergeny life focus of trading and investing. I asked myself, “Is this an acceptable way to spend my time? It feels selfish, petty because it’s pecuniary, and lacking in obvious connection to, let’s use Taylor’s term, a horizon of significance.”

But curiously, my trading and investing activities have, in fact, connected me to meaning and helped me see beyond myself to the Other and to the Good (as well as the Bad). I’ve become newly interested in history to complement my long-time study of philosophy. My readings in philosophy over the past three years of reinvention blogging brought me into contact with many European thinkers whose ideas were forged during the period before, during, and after World War II: Arendt, Heidegger (an actual Nazi), Jaspers, Levinas, de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Weil. Murdoch as well. As I read their work, I found it necessary to learn more about the history of the war, to situate their ideas within a time period of tumult and terror.

And then, the U.S. and Israel launched an attack on Iran (“a little excursion” Trump called it), this after the U.S. presidential administration had essentially declared war on a U.S. city via social media. What had been a project of studying to understand philosophical thinkers turned into a project of studying to understand the world I live in now.

Trading and investing doesn’t have much meaning of its own. For me, it’s an enjoyable exercise in intellectual understanding and mathematical application (with a large dose of emotional management). But it connects me to Taylor’s horizons of significance, so it is valuable in that way. An activity need not be intrinsically meaningful to have moral meaning, and meaning important to my developing authenticity.

The week ahead

It’s my 58th birthday today! I’m going with my dad to brunch. His birthday was yesterday. We always celebrate our birthdays with a joint event. My paternal grandmother — his mother — shared his birthday so we used to celebrate three birthdays at once, now just two.

This week I’ll be spending lots of time walking dogs. I discovered (through a scary situation that fortunately worked out ok) that I cannot walk my dog Bo and foster dog Sally together, because Sally requires all my attention. She is reactive on leash to other dogs and sometimes to people. At 65 pounds, she can really pull me around, so I have to be completely focused on what is happening and what her state of mind is so I can distract her and refocus her attention as necessary. She needs lots of walking as does my dog Bo so I’ll probably end up walking three or four miles a day across the two of them.

This week I would like to write about fostering dogs and adopting homeless animals and how that connects to the Good, as well as how it’s helping me to cultivate attention. The foster organization volunteer who sends out lists of dogs slated for euthanasia at shelters includes this quote in every email of “dogs in need”: “Saving one animal won’t change the world, but it will change the world for that one animal.” I am glad I have the resources to help homeless dogs and cats, and that’s yet another reason why managing and growing my income and retirement portfolios matter. More money means more ways I can help homeless animals.

Tomorrow, I have an optometry appointment to continue the process of figuring out what is wrong with my left eye, which can no longer be corrected to 20/20 vision. It seems to be a corneal problem, so I’m going to be having it checked out at Kaiser later in the month.

Besides that I’ll continue developing my options trading practice this week which is so far going well. It’s enjoyable and seems to suit my personality much better than buy-and-hold passive investing. Whether it will be as profitable remains to be seen.

From Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life by Bella DePaulo:

People who are single at heart have two big things going for them: they find single life deeply satisfying and they are not powerfully drawn to a coupled life. Why, then, do some people who are so well suited to living single keep trying to make romantic coupling work, even after disappointing experiences?

We keep trying because we think that we just chose the wrong person. Or we weren’t mature enough then, but now we are. Or we did not love ourselves enough to love someone else, and now we do. We keep trying because we are afraid that if we stay single, we will let our parents down. We keep trying because many of our friends have already headed down the path of romantic coupledon, and that makes it seem like we should too…. We keep trying because our steps toward success at romantic coupling are recognized and celebrated. Everyone is so happy for us when we are coupled! [emphasis mine]

I feel some sense of shame that I am single as much as I enjoy it. I tried for more than twelve years after my divorce to find a fulfilling romantic partnership. I tried it with different kinds of men and various types of relationships. I kept thinking, “that was just the wrong person for me!”

My attempts to find a more satisfying alternative within the same framework (necessary coupledom) is what Kazimierz Dabrowski would call unilevel disintegration. That’s when your life isn’t working so you try swapping out the components: how about this corporate technology job instead of that one? How about a different house in a different town? How about this romantic partner instead of that one? How about living together? How about living ten minutes apart?

With unilevel disintegration, you don’t question the societal scripts you’re living by. You just try to improve upon how you manifest them.

At some point, when this fails to bring fulfillment, you might think: maybe the problem is more deep-seated than that. Maybe I need to do something more radical than just switching out various options in the same style of life. You look at what is compared to what you imagine ought to be, if you were living your most value-driven and meaningful life. That’s Dabrowski’s multilevel disintegration where you don’t just stay on the same level you’re on (the level that says you must have a corporate job if you are less than 65 years old and that you must be partnered up). You explore different modes and frameworks of living and meaning.

DePaulo continues:

We keep trying [to make romantic coupling work] because we so rarely find themes of glorious lifelong singlehood in novels, TV shows, movies, poems, or songs. It is as if only romantic coupling can be truly, deeply, enduringly fulfilling.

All of that, and so much more, seems like a lot to give up. But somehow, for us, the life of conventional romantic coupling just doesn’t work. It is not fulfilling. It is not who we really are. When we are in a life organized around romantic coupling, we want out. We are never truly contented until we commit to our single lives and stop trying to unsingle ourselves.

Why aren’t there “themes of glorious lifelong singlehood” promoted in media? Because that’s not the societal script for people’s lives. That’s not the norm that cultures promote:

The couple norm positions romantic coupling, particularly in the form of marriage, as the standard against which everything else is measured and found wanting. Coupling is what is expected of adults. It is what they are all assumed to want.

How do norms emerge? And how and why did the norm of marriage as well as the institution of marriage develop? That is too large a question for this quick blog post.

This past week, I discovered Polish psychologist and psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski’s work on positive disintegration, his theory that to fully develop your personality you must go through a period of questioning societal norms. As you do so, you will find that your life disintegrates. You discover that what you thought was important is not, and you have to instead grow your own value framework and choose commitments that align.

While many psychologists would say that you need to develop good adjustment to your life circumstances, Dabrowski says no, maladjustment is a good thing. He argued that being well-adjusted to a sick or mediocre or even evil society is a sign of stunted growth. Positive maladjustment is, instead, a deliberate rejection of social norms, peer pressure, and your own lower-level habits in favor of a higher set of internal values you cultivate yourself.

Our culture promotes the idea that you must have a rich and regular social life to be well adjusted and psychologically healthy. It’s such a truism that most people would never question it. But for me, beyond my small set of very close relationships (with my three adult children, my two sisters, my parents who are thankfully healthy in their eighties, a couple important friends) I don’t need or seek any more social contact.

Last year I joined two art groups, made some friends, and exhibited my art in shows. But eventually I found it unfulfilling and burdensome to continue. Before I retired, I developed close relationships at my various jobs. I thought I would miss that when I left the corporate workforce. I don’t though, not at all.

In his book Solitude: A Return to the Self, psychiatrist Anthony Storr argues that modern psychology is biased towards the interpersonal. It assumes that if you aren’t socially active you are (negatively) maladjusted. He suggested that for highly intelligent or creative people, solitude is the primary environment for self-actualization. This aligns with Dabrowskian positive disintegration, wherein a cultural emphasis on socializing may become a barrier to the highest level of functioning rather than a necessary foundation.

A Nietzschean, Kierkegaardian lifestyle

Two of my favorite philosophers were famous for their hermithood.

After breaking his engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard retired into himself. He said there was “something spectral” about him that made him unfit for the realness of marriage. He spent the rest of his short life as a celibate bachelor, walking the streets of Copenhagen and then retreating to his study. He believed his solitude was akin to a religious vocation. He identified the single individual (den Enkelte) as the highest category one could reach, arguing that truth is found only when one stands alone before God, without the reinforcement of the crowd.

Frierich Nietzsche’s later life was similarly lived out in solitude. He left the academic life and what he called the noise of society to find high-altitude solitude of Sils Maria, Switzerland. As the hermit of Sils Maria, he would take six-hour walks alone. He was plagued by migraines and stomach issues. He famously said, “I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern.” He viewed solitude as a philosophical instrument. By separating himself he could better critique the premises of a culture he found mediocre.

I’m no Kierkegaard or Nietzsche but knowing that they found solitude key to their way of life helps me feel better about my own choices.

What is maladjustment anyway?

Maladjustment is “the inability to react successfully or satisfactorily to the demands of one’s environment… [It] often implies an individual’s failure to meet social or cultural expectations.”

I guess one could say that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were both maladjusted. Kierkegaard didn’t choose the culturally “correct” path of getting married, having children, and perhaps pursuing a prestigious professorship. Nietzsche left academics too and as well did not marry.

The choice to live alone is one that most cultures don’t promote. That’s because a culture benefits from people pairing up and having children together. But that’s a topic for another time.

Today, I’m celebrating my positive maladjustment.

I’ve been watching Season 2 of America’s Test Kitchen: Next Generation, a competition in which cooks compete for a chance to become a cast member on ATK’s television shows and social media. I don’t know who won yet so if you do, don’t mention it!

One of my favorite competitors is Lauren. She is always overreacting to what happens. She cried when her focaccia and fruit crostada’s weren’t fully baked. She moaned, “I hope I don’t lose my finger!” when she cut it (to be fair, she did need stitches and maybe lost a nail?) She is a perfectionist, which generally isn’t a good thing. But she is absolutely brilliant in her cooking and her conceptualization. When she had a basket of different kinds of expensive mushrooms and truffles to create an entree with, she used every different kind and produced a dish that one of the judges said could easily be served at a Michelin three-star restaurant.

I’m overreactive like that too, and I can be a perfectionist. I hold myself to high standards partly because I know what excellence is. Also, though, I’m just lacking in perspective and equanimity a lot of the time.

Polish psychologist, psychiatrist, and physician Kazimierz Dąbrowski didn’t just develop the theory of positive disintegration I’ve been writing about lately. He also proposed that some people possess certain overexcitabilities that challenge them towards personal growth. The five he identified are:

• Emotional — having a deep, complex, nuanced emotional response to life. People with this overexcitability have intense feelings, strong empathy and a tendency towards guilt and self-criticism.
• Intellectual — having a deep thirst for learning and ideas with a need to analyze everything. These people have a love of theory and ask probing questions of any situation that they find themselves interested in.
• Imaginational — having the capacity for vivid visualization and use of metaphor which results in a rich internal world. Engaging in “what if” thinking.
• Psychomotor — having a surplus of physical and mental energy. Taking immediate physical action when triggered.
• Sensual — having a heightened awareness of sensory inputs (sights, sounds, tastes, and textures). Experiencing a deep appreciation for beauty but also overreacting to unpleasant sensory stimuli like loud noises or physical pain.

Lauren clearly has emotional overexcitability but this is probably combined with intellectual and sensual overexcitabilities that mean she thinks in deep ways about how to conceptualize, cook, and present a dish (intellectual) and how to create flavor profiles and textural experiences that produce pleasure in the eater (sensual).

Going from unorganized to organized overexcitabilities

Dabrowski didn’t believe that overexcitabilities (OEs) go away and he didn’t think that they should. He considered OEs to be a permanent part of the nervous system. But he believed they could manifest differently as a person develops.

In his theory of positive disintegration, the goal is to shift OEs from unorganized to organized rather than dampening or eliminating them. At lower levels of development, OEs may feel like a burden. They manifest as nervousness, emotional volatility, impulsive reactions, and, sometimes, paralyzing ansiety. During positive disintegration, the OEs fuel the conflict between what is and what ought to be. This creates energy for reinvention and personal transformation. At higher leves, when a person reaches a new level of integration not based on societal demands but based on their vision of who they might be, the OEs are channeled towards contribution and meaningful activities via conscious, autonomous choices.

Overexcitability and investing

Perhaps one reason I find buy-and-hold passive investing so unsatisfying is because of my intellectual overexcitability. I love to stay on top of what’s happening macroeconomically and geopolitically and filter that into my investment decisions. I love to learn about new trading and investing ideas, and put them into practice. I love the math and probability involved in options trading. Passive investing doesn’t tap into any of that.

I can see how my intellectual OE has driven my personal development in this particular domain. I started out trying to follow conventional advice around managing my money. I tried a variety of things — an asset manager (still use one for my retirement portfolio), Schwab’s robo-portfolio, dollar-cost averaging myself into a diversified set of ETFs, trading based on instinct. None of them worked well.

My intellectual overexcitability around money management provided fuel for change. I saw a gap between “what is” — how I’m doing with conventional money management and how I see other people doing and how I know you can lose a ton of money in a bear market — and “what ought to be” — a style of money management that suits my temperament, protects my nest egg, generates income, and keeps me happily engaged with daily trading and investing decisions.

I don’t feel like I’ve gotten to the point of organized overexcitability yet in trading, but I’m closing in on it.

I don’t read much online that inspires me or grabs me lately. It could be that too much of what I read is AI generated, and doesn’t represent the difficult human work of turning actual thoughts into sentences, paragraphs, and an overall argument. It could be that I’ve been spending too much time reading about war current and past to try to understand the current geopolitical unrest, when I should broaden my perspective.

But yesterday I came across an article that spoke to my heart, starting with the title: I am an idiot, by Julie Zhuo.

“I am an idiot” is a thought that comes to me regularly. I have done so many idiotic things in my life! And so has Zhuo. She’s going to lean into it:

It’s time I stopped with the fear of being an idiot.

Let me sink into the notion, cozy into it like I would a plush set of slippers.

I’ve been an idiot too many times to count. I’ve blurted out the wrong things, chased the wrong trains, and assumed I actually knew exactly what I was doing.

I suspect I’ll grow even more idiotic, as we ricochet faster and faster into a future none of us can predict.

So call me an idiot. I’ll agree.

Zhuo ties the question of artificial intelligence into the article:

The machines are getting smarter with every model.

At first, they overpowered us with their calculation speed.

Then, their fluency with the world’s accumulated knowledge passed ours.

Soon, their prediction will sharpen. Their taste will catch up. Their judgment will improve.

I am an idiot, yes. But as time goes on, we all may well be.

I find this part of the article the least interesting and the least persuasive. It jolted me out of the transcendent insight of the article into yet another awestruck reflection on the power and potential of artificial intelligence.

The key insight from the article is a meditation on what it is to be human: to feel like you don’t know what’s going on or what to do or why you just did what you did when it proved, after the fact, to be so incredibly moronic.

AI that can find more and more security vulnerabilities, program a computer better and better, or produce a poem on command? That doesn’t impinge upon our idiocy, or on our brilliance.

Clown-activist Wavy Gravy said, “We’re all bozos on the bus, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.” That’s true, no matter how capable artificial intelligence becomes.

In his book The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium (1993), flow theoretician Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that it is better to become complex than stay simple:

To help guide the progress of evolution it is not sufficient for a person to enjoy merely any kind of life, but a life that increases order instead of disorder. To contribute to greater harmony, a person’s consciousness has to become complex. Complexity of consciousness is not a function of only intelligence or knowledge, and is not just a cognitive trait—it includes a person’s feelings and actions as well. It involves becoming aware of and in control of one’s unique potentials, and being able to create harmony between goals and desires, sensations and experiences, both for oneself and for others. People who achieve this are not only going to have a more fulfilling life, but they are almost certainly more likely to contribute to a better future. Personal happiness and a positive contribution to evolution go hand in hand.

Csikszentmihalyi believes that humans can direct life towards positive progress:

If there is a central task for humankind in the next millennium, it is to start on the right track in its efforts to control the direction of evolution. Much irreparable damage could be done either by ignoring the necessity confronting us, or by a panicked overreaction that could lead to the kind of racist applications of social evolution that the Nazis attempted earlier this century, and the Serbs attempted at the century’s end.

When he refers to evolution he’s not talking just of Darwinian-style adaptive reproductive fitness. He’s talking about cultural evolution too, the kind that operates via memes instead of via genes. Cultural and social evolution produces practices, technology, ideas, and more such as the worldwide use of fiat currency, the development of guns for punishing people or getting them to do what you want, and the idea of Aryan supremacy as the basis of a political movement.

How much are we in control?

I’ve just watched a five-part documentary on Netflix Turning Point: The Vietnam War. I was struck by parallels between that war and what’s happening now with Iran. Then, the U.S. presidential administration was dishonest with the U.S. population about what was actually happening and what the chances of success are. Then, the U.S. government thought that their superior military might would mean an easy victory. Then, the U.S. government became mired in a terrible war of attrition that sometimes was only pursued for political gains (as when Nixon continued with it so as to secure his second term).

We don’t know exactly how the U.S./Israel/Iran War will resolve. But it’s striking that in the more than sixty years since large U.S. combat operations started in Vietnam there has been little to no progress in the actions of U.S. presidential administrations with respect to unwinnable wars. Each one thinks “this time is different.” And it’s not.

I find Csikszentmihalyi’s idea that someone can become more complex and then direct (cultural) evolution somewhat questionable. But that is not to say that individual people can’t affect cultural evolution. It is to say that there’s very little opportunity to override the worst parts of human nature: the development of tribalism, nationalism, and racism; the will to power of fascistic leaders; the use of dishonesty to persuade the citizenry that government actions are justified; the pursuit of personal gain via political office instead of seeking societal benefits.

Back to the transcendent self

Nevertheless, I like Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of the transcender, or “T-person”: someone who nurtures harmony and “whose psychic energy is joyfully invested in complex goals.”

Like many developmental psychologists, Csikszentmihalyi proposes that to advance and progress as a person you need to differentiate from the culture and society around you. I wrote about Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski’s idea of positive disintegration on Sunday. That’s another example of a theory that suggests that living only according to cultural and societal dictates leaves you in a state of underdevelopment. To progress further you need to question societal norms and throw off those that don’t suit. And then you need to pursue a new level of integration after differentiation (or disintegration). You move towards values that you evaluate and select yourself, that perhaps (and ideally) lead you towards a more virtuous, more contributory, more meaningful, altogether better life.

Csikszentmihalyi suggests that to become a transcender, through differentiation and integration, you should:

• Learn to enjoy life ideally via the practice of flow
• Seek out complexity, cultivating curiosity and interest, finding new challenges, continuously developing new skills
• Master wisdom and spirituality, seeing through the deceptions of cultural memes and achieving a deeper level of understanding of the reality of life
• Invest psychic energy in the future, in a non-self-centered way

This is an appealing prescription to me but seems somewhat lacking in concrete details (which may be somewhere in The Evolving Self — I have only skimmed it so far). And I am skeptical that there is much individual people can do to stand against the tide of history and human nature.

In his 1993 book The Evolving Self, Hungarian-American psychologist and flow theoretician Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that your brain hides reality from you via three influences or “veils”: genetic instructions, cultural rules, and the “unbridled desires of the self.” He writes, “these distortions are comforting, yet they need to be seen through for the self to be truly liberated.”

Today, I want to look at the second: culture.

Csikszentmihalyi writes:

If ethnocentrism seems to be an inevitable outcome of belonging to a culture, there is probably no other way of being. Survival and self-esteem depend on those among whom we are born. By now, to be human we need the instructions transmitted through culture almost as much as we need genetic instructions. How else would we talk, read, count, think? The genes cannot teach these skills; we must learn them from women and men who speak our language, from the knowledge stored in books and other symbols systems. But in the process of teaching us how to be human, culture begins to make its claims. Just as genes use the body as a vehicle for their own reproduction, a culture also tends to use individuals as vehicles for its own survival and growth.

To succeed in life, one must accept some level of acculturation, but if it goes too far, it limits your individuality:

Excessive acculturation leads one to see reality only through the veils of culture. A person who invests psychic energy exclusively in goals prescribed by society is forfeiting the possibility of choice.

Csikszentmihalyi shares a description of the Gusii society of West Africa. This culture instills three goals in its members: to own as many head of cattle as possible representing wealth, to have as many children and grandchildren as possible to increase social position, and to gain spiritual power by taking action to gain fear and respect from one’s peers. These activities leave “very little room for poetry, romance, or flights of the imagination beyond these goals.” A Gusii tribesman is not just a slave to his drives such as those for food, sex, and bodily survival but also to the demands of culture.

The culture of the West today is similar to how it was when The Evolving Self was published:

The culture that spans most of our society looks up to the likes of Donald Trump, Ivan Boesky, and Michael Milken because they have amassed large herds of dollars; worships General Norman Schwarzkopf because he bombed the enemy into submission; pays millions to a basketball player because he jumps higher than anyone else; and swoons at the feet of entertainers who serve as symbols of youth, beauty, and a happy life, even though the person behind the smiling mask is more often than not a confused and unhappy wretch.

Csikszentmihalyi doesn’t suggest that you discard your cultural inheritance entirely because it provides a useful set of instructions and ideas for life success and adaptation to the world around you. He only suggests you question it:

[It] is also useful… to take off the distorting glasses that we have grown accustomed to wearing, and look at what is happening from a different perspective. To what extent have I accepted other people’s definition of who I am and what I could be? How ignorant am I of the values held by people of different cultures? Or more prosaically: Do I actually like the highly advertised values of my car? Is the company I work for deserving of my loyalty? Is working seventy hours a week really the best investment of my life energy? Is a slim figure, a youthful look the highest peak of human accomplishment?

And he also suggests you “question the descriptions of reality of one’s culture, and especially those presented by the media.” This is where I think that I, and people around me, fairly regularly fail to see reality. We take our chosen news sources as truthful, objective reports of the world and events happening with in it. We don’t see that every news report embeds a particular subjective outlook.

Tomorrow, in my Tuesday Book Club post, I’ll share the antidote to the veils of illusion that Csikszentmihalyi identifies: seeking a life that increases order instead of disorder, to develop a complexity of consciousness, so that you might contribute to a better future not just for yourself, but for many people.